Qui is exciting for its food--the chef describes it as "drawing inspiration from travels across America, San Sebastian, France, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Vietnam and Japan," and he delivers that kind of wide-ranging inventiveness in dishes like his Catfish Like Unagi, Rabbit 7 Ways, and the Salmon Butter starter--but the concept goes way beyond the menu. The plates are all custom-made by a local potter, the aprons hand-sewn by a local tailor, and there's hand-painted wall art from a Japanese artist/comedian named Peelander Yellow. But when it came to the restaurant's staff, Qui decided to do something radical: He had everyone trained together.

Take a second for that to sink in. In most restaurants, the staff is rigidly divided into Front of House and Back of House--the servers and the cooks--and then further subdivided into headwaiters, hosts, prep cooks, dishwashers, expediters, and so on, all responsible only for their narrow purview, specialized like workers on the line at a Ford plant. The professional kitchen culture generally prides itself on this hierarchy, this rigidity, this semi-military specificity. But at Qui, they trained everyone together.

What that means, practically, is that everyone, from the dishwashers to the bartenders to the sous chefs, had to memorize the wine list, and learn about the brewing process behind the beers, and be able to explain how they make the chartreuse falernum in the "Moment of Clarity" cocktail to a curious guest. And everyone, cooks included, had to learn how to walk on the floor with poise, and greet a guest, and bus a table without breaking any of the hard-to-handle custom plates, and all of the other million small tasks that, typically, are left to servers who have long experience interacting with diners. This training took two months.

"Our cooks are our primary food runners," said Bill Mann, the soon-to-be General Manager at Qui (as the former GM transitions to being Director of Operations), "the person who makes your food is going to be the one delivering it, and the one standing at your table telling you about it."

They also taught the servers how to work in the kitchen, in case the fluid workforce needs shoring up in the Back of House. "The likelihood of asking a back waiter to work on the saute station is pretty low," he admitted, "but they need to know the mise en place for that saute station, and know what the chef needs."

If you've ever been in a professional kitchen, you might have some sense of what a crazy idea this is. And it was not an easy process.

"The guys on the line, they're cooking, and plating with tweezers, and they're hunched over a grill," Mann said, but the goal was to get the cooks to the point where, "once you're done plating your plate, and chef looks it over and decides it's good enough to sell, then you're able to come out, take your side towel off your apron, put your game face on, and go out and explain it to the guest."

And here, in graphic form, is how Qui turned Back of House barbarians into world-class servers:

A rough set of rules for turning a Back of House barbarian into a Front of House diner's delight. (Credit: Erik Peterson.)

A lot of this just had to do with learning a certain set of rules for motion: stand with an open posture; yield to guests, then hot food, then plates while on the floor; make eye contact and smile; don't cross your arms; never show guests the back of your hands; don't put your hands in your pockets; don't hunch; don't lean; don't touch any guests, or guests' furniture; put plates down with your left hand; pick plates up with your right.

"We spent countless hours just having everyone walking around with plates of water," Mann said, and he means it: they'd fill the shallowest plates they had up to the brim with water, and have the staff take laps around the dining room and patio, drop the plates off to imaginary guests, and then return to clear them.

But after two months, all the practice paid off. "It's fun to watch these guys go from being these animal line cooks," Mann said, "and then when they go out on the floor they're moving like Front of House."

Besides the thrill of having the person who just cooked your food actually bring it out to you and talk about it, the new staff structure has some benefits for the restaurant and the workers themselves. On the restaurant side, Qui was able to go lean on Front of House hires, and still have a staff that's knowledgeable enough to handle any task thrown at them, from mixing a drink to stacking the fragile, custom plates correctly in the cabinets.And on the staff side, there are even more pluses: everyone splits tips (which might be a legal problem for some NYC restaurants, but Mann says that "with Texas gratuity laws, it's really the Wild West out here"), and it's a rare opportunity for workers to pick up skills and knowledge outside of their normal realm. "The goal is that, when they move on to the next place," Mann said, "they can gain more responsibility, and draw on this to manage other people, and hopefully manage their own people someday."

For the next few weeks, you're probably going to be seeing a lot of press about what it's like to actually eat at Qui, and how the chef is pushing the culinary envelope, and how it changes the Austin dining scene. But at the heart of the operation, in plain sight but unlikely to be caught on Instagram, is a totally new way of training, and treating, restaurant workers.